If you've had trouble figuring out the differences in service and pricing structure between ADSL and cable modems, dial-up and broadband, well, all I can tell you is to prepare yourself for some complications before you get too involved in reading this since the inevitable headache is sure to result. That's right, folks - they're changing the technology, yet again. The current range of download speeds available for both cable and DSL/ADSL modems isn't sufficient for the "Next Big Thing": video or TV on demand. So, the people in charge of these things - phone and cable companies, international consortia of various shapes and sizes and, of course, the marketing department - went back to the drawing board and came up with a bunch of new technological candidates that will provide faster, easier and smoother access to all things digital, including video, data and voice systems. The new converged systems will replace the current un-converged digital technologies, as well as require the hapless citizenry to learn a whole new bunch of acronyms.

Here I am in Ireland and the last thing in the world I am looking forward to is flying through London Heathrow to get back home.  British intel was tipped off by some good guys inserted by Parvez Musharaff into ISI (Pakistan intel) about a Moslem terrorist plot to blow up airliners flying out of Heathrow to America.  So the security is a nightmare - for everyone, not just Moslems. Thus I was thrilled to hear about The Heroes of Malaga - British passengers on a Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga, Spain to Manchester, England on August 16 who refused to fly until two Moslems were taken off the plane. The liberal British media was horrified.  The London Daily Mail ran a story entitled Asian students' shock at ejection from jet by passenger mutiny.  It is forbidden, you see, to refer to Moslems as such in the British media.  The accepted code word is "Asian" - as if they were Chinese or Japanese, anything but Moslem. The "Asians" complained bitterly they were "humiliated."  So I have a modest proposal to end their humiliation, and increase airport security as well.

There is an amusing story about Sir Arthur Eddington, who in the 1920s and 1930s was Britain's leading expert on Einstein's theory of relativity.  Eddington was once asked to comment on the rumor that only three people in the world, by implication including himself and Einstein, properly understood the theory.  There was a long pause before Eddington replied slowly,  "I wonder who the third person is." The theory of relativity has a fearsome reputation, the widespread belief being that any theory formulated by a man of such legendary genius as Albert Einstein must be beyond the power of ordinary people to grasp. Yet today, Einstein's theory is routinely taught in universities around the world, and libraries contain a range of student textbooks on the subject. Either the students of today are much brighter than they are sometimes given credit for, or the theory is not so fearsomely difficult to grasp after all.

Finally, a war like Vietnam. If the cease fire in Lebanon actually goes into effect, Israel will have lost despite having won every battle, because political dithering prevented decisive victory. Hezbollah will have won through a propaganda campaign what it could not obtain on the battlefield. Hezbollah won by surviving.  Israel's reputation for military invincibility is shattered.  The vultures are circling: "Today Arab and Muslim society is reasonably certain that the defeat of Israel is possible and that the countdown to the disappearance of the Zionist entity in the region has begun," Ahmed Barakat, a member of Hezbollah's central council, told a Qatari newspaper. As in Vietnam, the overwhelming failure was in political leadership. 

It was the summer of 1992.  Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help take care of him.  A friend of mine named Ray Kline called.  Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon). It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy's desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States. That's how the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Ray was calling to tell me about a 30th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from.  The conference was in Havana, Cuba. "You went to Cuba, Ray?" I asked, amazed.  "Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro's people are nervous" he replied.  "They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US.  They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them." Ray paused for effect.  "I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation." "You've got to be kidding, Ray," was all I could say. "Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron.  Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?" I told him I would think about it.  I decided to go and told my wife, Rebel, my reason:  "I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave."  She decided to go with me - in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.

So, it finally comes out: There's a method to the madness of Google's super-generosity in supplying users with mega-gigabytes of free storage space for e-mail, photos, and even uploads and downloads. Why preserve users' search data not as an aggregate but as information derived from user accounts? The latest Internet scandal caught major search engine AOL committing a serious (from users' point of view) gaffe when it inadvertently released information from about 19 million search requests made by more than 658,000 AOL subscribers during the three months ended in May.

Watching the war in Lebanon and listening to the debate about it is just like watching the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and its attendant debate. Israelis are demanding the resignation of Olmert, just as Americans are demanding the head of Bush. Israeli military experts, real and self-proclaimed, are explaining how the Lebanon war could have been won if only the ground campaign had started earlier, or had been more ambitious. American strategists of varying competence are explaining how the Iraq war could have been won, if only there were more boots on the ground, or if only a different strategy had been employed, or if only the Baathist army had been kept intact. I think it's nonsense. Both campaigns and both debates suffer from the same narrow focus, the same failure of strategic vision, when the war itself - the real war - is far wider.